To Protect and Serve

Themselves, not the public.

I've been a longtime resident of San Luis Obispo County, a very quiet place on California's central coast.  Light traffic, low crime.  Despite this, our Sherriff's Department has consistently grown especially in salaries and pension benefits.  There are desk pushers making, yes, hundreds of thousands a year.  A strong union sleeping with and pushing feckless politicians around is a cool feature in this discourse.

Now confronted with "budget shortfall" (hey how about rolling back last year's double-digit pay increase and losing some top-heavy admin?) the suggested solution is to reluctantly consider letting 11 employees go and, most importantly, letting inmates out of jail!

Similar self-serving twaddle is emanating from municipalities all over the country.  The private sector has pulled in its collective belt mightily in this Depression (yes, I will call it that because of all the spin and BS being used to obscure the true states of joblessness, credit risks, and even threats to sovereignty around the world) but the public sector is largely responding by cutting services.  There was an NPR report on Colorado Springs where instead of laying off more employees or cutting pay and benefits, public management closed all the parks and no longer performs road maintenance.  I wonder what all those remaining employees actually do all day now that they no longer need to either provide services or appear to?  In San Jose, public employees have the gall to talk to Ms TV microphone and say that people can't jog or walk in a park because they can't afford to provide services there on certain days of the week, making it unsafe.  Where are the cost savings for these reduced services?!  Maybe there is a deeper meaning of 'unsafe'.

When Arnold the Governator suggested that illegal immigrants imprisoned in California be relocated to incarceration south of the border, a real political firestorm broke out... by the Prison Guards union.  Great going guys (and gals), way to protect and serve... your own interests.

San Francisco Municipal transit employees (contractually GUARANTEED of being at least the 2nd highest paid in the USA, who negotiated THAT? and which contract has the cojones to actually demand to be the Highest-Paid?) are very grumbly about "budget shortfalls"... let's see, we have bus drivers making $140K... you don't suppose they could have a temporary pay rollback until better times emerge?  NO!!! The plan is to.... REDUCE SERVICE and in case you haven't noticed, SF buses and trains are quite full almost all of the time.  The public, as usual, is likely to get the shaft from THEIR EMPLOYEES.

Voters and taxpayers are still 99.9% asleep when it comes to holding public employees accountable.  Instead, we've let public employment count, salaries and pensions go through the roof.  Politicians love public employees, an easy voting block to buy.  It's just like elementary school, except that in public service, they really do put Coke in the drinking fountains.